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Microsoft Word 97 established the word processing application as a market leader. During an unprecedented period of popularity in personal computers, Microsoft Word quickly found itself in almost all businesses and many homes, establishing itself as the de facto standard for creating written documents. As part of the Office 1997 software package, users were able to use the program to create simple documents and quickly became familiar with the toolbar and menu driven user interface which remained consistent through later releases up to 2003.

The DOC file extension has become so synonymous with word processed files that it is arguably the most widely known file extension. Used for files created by Microsoft Word for DOS through to Word 2003, the format has seen a huge number of improvements but was superseded with the release of Microsoft Word 2007. Many users of Word 2007 continue to use the old DOC format to ensure compatibility with other users from different businesses.

A CSV file is a way to collect the data from any table so that it can be conveyed as input to another table-oriented application such as a relational database application. Microsoft Excel, a leading spreadsheet or relational database application, can read CSV files. A CSV file is sometimes referred to as a flat file.

In computers, a CSV file contains the different values in a table as a series of ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) text lines which are then organised so that each column value is separated by a comma from the next columns value and each row starts a new line. CSV is one example of a delimited text file, which uses a comma to separate values (many other implementations of CSV allow different seperators such as back or forward slash to be used). However CSV differs from other delimiter separated file formats in using a double quote character around fields that contain reserved characters (such as commas or newlines). The benefit of this approach is that it allows the transfer of data across different applications.

Associated programs

The CSV file format is very simple and supported by almost all spreadsheets and database management systems